ICON welcomes its newest board member

Heidi Mantis – Cisco Collaboration Business Development Manager at Telstra – is the newest member of the ICON board. Mantis has been working in business-to-business marketing for 19 years. After starting in engineering, she worked at EY, and then took on roles in business consulting before joining Telstra.

She will join the other 13 members of the ICON board and has some exciting and ambitious plans to develop the ICON community.

Mantis wants to broaden the reach of ICON to the IT industry, noting that “technology is so integral to what we do as marketers – you can’t get rid of it, especially now when we have to measure our KPIs”. By broadening the community, Mantis believes ICON will be able to engage more members and create new opportunities for discussion topics and speakers. “I want to push the boundaries a little,” she says.

Mantis has been an ICON member for more than five years and says that it was the connections she made at ICON events that left a lasting impression on her. She noticed that her career began to improve, as she had a better understanding of what her colleagues were doing. “What keeps you coming back is the opportunity to share things with like-minded people … that real candid opportunity to speak with others who understand what you do,” says Mantis.

Mantis attended a number of ICON events while working at EY and got to know several people in the ICON community. These were defining moments in her involvement with ICON. “The good thing about these sorts of events is that you start gaining friendships and connections with people across a variety of industries and there is still that opportunity to keep those relationships regardless of where you end up,” she says.

It was the connections made at ICON events that left a lasting impression ... her career began to improve as she had a better understanding of what her colleagues were doing.

Mantis acknowledges that “working in a firm where your colleagues don’t fully understand what you’re doing can feel very isolating”. This is something that many people who work in marketing in smaller firms and industries such as engineering can sometimes experience. ICON gives them a place where they feel supported and connected. “If you surround yourself with people who do what you do, it helps you grow personally,” she says.

ICON’s conferences also had a major influence on Mantis: “The topics were right on the money. There were things that I was interested in, and the challenges discussed in the conferences were the things that I was facing.” She says the conferences aided her career development and gave her the chance to meet people in her field from other states.

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